Butler's Cinema Scene

David Dastmalchian, Karen Gillan

“ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW” My rating: B

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

Filmed mostly in Kansas City, Collin Schiffli’s “All Creatures Here Below” reminds of a 21st-century retooling of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Its background is not the Great Depression but rather the hardscrabble world of the contemporary underclass. In lieu of the childlike giant Lenny it offers a young woman of similar simplicity, though her mental/emotional fragility is born less of genetics than a ghastly past.

And like Steinbeck’s novel,  David Dastmalchian’s screenplay is rooted in a fatalism that offers only brief flickers of stubborn — and elusive — hope.

The good news is that the piece has been so well acted by its two leads that it keeps us involved long after our logical sides tell us it’s time to bail.

Gensan (Dastmalchian) and Ruby (Karen Gillan) are a young couple living hand to mouth in Los Angeles.

In the film’s first few minutes he is laid off from his job making pizzas (corporate is trimming the work force) and she is let go from her gig on the cleaning crew of a megachurch…apparently Ruby can’t keep from hanging around the nursery, which she has been told is off limits to her. (In Mice… Lenny has a thing for rabbits; Ruby obsesses about babies.)

Desperate for cash, Gensan wagers his severance paycheck on an illegal cockfight. He loses big but in the ensuing chaos of a police raid manages to make off with a stolen car and a wad of cash from the betting table. He gets word to Ruby to meet him away from their apartment; they have to get out of Dodge.

She shows up as directed, only she has with her the infant daughter of their neighbor. Ruby has found the child unattended and decided that she’d be the better mother.

Now the frantic — and let’s face it, not very bright — Gensan must navigate a drive across half the country with the maddeningly illogical Ruby and a crying baby who needs diapers, a child car seat, and nourishment (Ruby is so clueless she attempts to breast feed; even Gensan knows you have to be pregnant before that works).

Though they struggle to appear normal, there’s something seriously off about Ruby and Gensen. They are so illogical and impulse driven that one is tended to dismiss them  as unworthy of our attention and compassion.

Here’s where the performances click in. Though they often bicker, though a frightened Gensan often calls Ruby stupid for the jeopardy in which she is always placing them, these two share a soul-searing love which Dastmalchian and Gillan bring to the fore.  Which is not to say that they are lovers in the traditional sense…can’t say more without blowing the film’s big reveal.

Eventually they end up in the Midwestern city where they were reared, and through their Uncle Doug (John Doe) we pick up some disturbing suggestions of Gensan and Ruby’s hellish upbringing and how they became the damaged people they now are.

This is the second collaboration between  the Overland Park-reared writer/actor Dastmalchian and director Schiffli…their first was 2014’s “Animals,” one of the best drug-addiction dramas of recent years.

They were able to find locations in the Kansas City area to suggest stopovers between California and KC. Not that you’ll see any local landmarks here. This is a world of off-brand gas stations, strip malls, thrift shops and roadside cafes.  Not a Chamber of Commerce-approved shot in sight.

“All Creatures…” is a downer, certainly, and its melodramatic denouement may strike some as improbable (though not if you know your Steinbeck.) But Schiffli and his players find a core of humanity there that holds us even as Ruby and Gensan’s situation becomes increasingly more dire.

| Robert W. Butler